Eric is a new manager of product information for a national firm which wholesales electrical components.
He's proud because he was assigned a 'tough' office right out of management training. He's challenged because he can see as clearly as everyone else in the office that the work is not getting done on time - and that mistakes are far above the 2 per cent target. And he's scared because he finds himself utterly incapable of figuring out what he ought to do to make things better.
Eric's first day
The office is a new, one-storey building in a wooded suburban location - complete with carpeting on the floor and Muzak in the walls. There are 35 female employees, ranging from recent high school graduates in their first job to experienced middle-aged housewives. Their job is to provide salesmen in the field with current information about price, availability and delivery times of an exceptionally large inventory of electrical equipment and supplies.
Eric spent his first day on the job - some three months ago now - just watching and listening. While in management training, he had thought a lot about how he would handle that first day. He knew that everyone in the office would be as eager to find out what he was like as he was to learn about them and their jobs. And he wanted to make a good impression.
But Eric finally decided not to give a false impression.
The fact was that he knew virtually nothing about the people he would be managing, or the kind of work they did. So why, he asked himself, act otherwise? Besides, if the people saw that he was genuinely interested in listening to them and learning from them, perhaps that would help establish good mutual rapport between him and his people. So he would just watch, and listen, and try to learn in his first few days on the job.
The first day was fun. Soon after arriving and being introduced to the four first-level supervisors, he asked to be 'plugged in' to one of the complicated-looking operating consoles at which the women received calls from the field. A green light would blink on the console, and the information clerk would be connected to the salesman in the field - all taken care of by an outof sight computer, which assigned calls sequentially to the waiting clerks. The salesman would ask for information about the availability of a certain piece of equipment. The clerk would then look up the stock number of that item in a large catalogue at her side and punch the number into a keyboard on the console.
Immediately, the computer would present full information about stocks and delivery times of that item on an electronic display panel on the console, and the clerk would relay the appropriate information to the salesman.
When the call ended, the green light would extinguish itself, and the clerk would then wait for the light to flash again, signalling the arrival of a new call.
Eric was fascinated by both the efficiency of the operation and the pleasantness of the surroundings. His biggest worry at that point was that everything was so efficiently designed that he, as manager, would not have anything to do with his time.
Beware first impressions
He soon learned how wrong he was. When, on his second day at the office, he began to attack a pile of paperwork on his desk, he found messages from nearly a dozen field salesmen, all wanting him to return their calls. Each of these salesmen, it turned out, had a significant complaint about the product information service - and some were obviously quite angry. Eric managed to maintain a calm, responsive stance in relation to the complaining salesmen, but he also felt his stomach tightening as he heard what they had to say. By the day's end, he had made a list of three general problems which seemed both frequent enough and serious enough to warrant his immediate attention and action:
1 Salesmen often were unable to get through quickly to information clerks. Since salesmen's calls usually were made from customer offices, this meant that they were left holding the telephone of a client for up to 10 or 15 minutes waiting for a clerk
- while both the salesman and the customer became increasingly impatient.
2 Errors were excessive. Salesman after salesman reported that, on the basis of information provided by the clerks, they would promise delivery of materials on a specific date at a specific price - only to hear later from an irate customer that the materials had not been delivered, that the price was different from that quoted, or (all too often) both. The clerks were often abrupt and unfriendly to the salesmen when they called. According to more than one salesman, the clerks acted as if they were being imposed upon, rather than providing the salesmen with help in carrying out the company's business.
The source of the problems
In the following week, as Eric attempted to track down the reasons for these difficulties, other problems came to light. First, absenteeism and turnover were extremely high. It appeared that the excessive delays were partly due to the fact that 15 to 20 per cent of the clerks were unlikely to show up for work on any given day - especially Monday and Friday - and that up to an hour's tardiness was not uncommon.
This created call 'backups' on the computer.
The computer, of course, calmly held the calls for as long as necessary, oblivious as only a machine can be to the rise in tempers in the customer's office.
When absenteeism was particularly high on any given day, part-time employees were called to fill in.
Many of these individuals were not entirely familiar with the job and often did not remember some of the procedures to be used in looking up equipment numbers in the catalogue - resulting in wrong catalogue numbers and erroneous information being given to the customers. Worse, even experienced clerks had a high error rate. Eric's hope that the error problem was in the computerised information displayed on the clerks' consoles rather than a fault of the clerks themselves was clearly misplaced.
Reports of errors arrived weeks after the information was provided (when orders failed to arrive on the customer's premises, or arrived with unexpected prices), and so it was usually impossible to determine who had made the mistake or why.

Questions

(a) Analyse the issues of management and organisational behaviour which are raised in this case study.
(b) Suggest solutions to the problems faced by Eric and Kipsy.